Mozilla boss ponders Thunderbird spin-off

The Mozilla Foundation is thinking about creating a separate organisation to take control of its Thunderbird email application, allowing it to concentrate on development of the Firefox Web browser.

John Blau, IDG News Service
July 26, 2007

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The Mozilla Foundation is thinking about creating a separate organisation to take control of its Thunderbird email application, allowing it to concentrate on development of the Firefox web browser.

In a blog posting, Mitchell Baker, CEO of Mozilla, a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, called for a new structure to allow “the Thunderbird community to determine its own destiny” and asked the open-source community for input.

Baker said Mozilla’s Thunderbird effort “is dwarfed” by the energy it spends on the Firebox browser and the ecosystem around it.

“Mozilla doesn’t focus on Thunderbird as much as we do on Firefox and we don’t expect this to change in the foreseeable future,” she wrote. A separate organisation focused on the maintenance and further development of the email client, she added, would be able to move independently and thus deepen the user community.

There is more than organisational structure at stake, however. As web-based email services such as Google’s Gmail, accessible from anywhere through a browser, gain in sophistication and numbers of users, stand-alone applications such as Thunderbird that tie access to an email account to a single computer must offer more to compete. In her blog, Baker alluded to the need to create and implement “a new vision of mail.”

The Mozilla executive offered three options for a new Thunderbird structure. One could be a new non-profit organisation similar to the Mozilla Foundation. While providing the maximum amount of independence, this model is also the most organisationally complex, requiring good board members to be found and recreating the administrative load.

A second option is to create a new Mozilla Foundation subsidiary to house Thunderbird. In this model, the foundation’s board and personnel would remain involved in the management of the product, but as a result the Thunderbird effort could still suffer from less focus and flexibility.

A third option is to release Thunderbird as a community project, like the SeaMonkey suite of Internet applications, with a small services company set up to support users. “Many open-source projects use this model,” Baker wrote. “It could be simpler and more effective than a Mozilla Foundation subsidiary.”

In a separate blog posting, Scott MacGregor, a co-developer of Thunderbird, wrote that he and fellow co-founder David Bienvenu support the third option - to release Thunderbird as a community project and create an independent production company.